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Director Stanley and assistant director Spencer Lin meet Millie Ogden, Trade Commissioner of Vanuatu, at a local festival in Monterey Park, California. Their nonprofit, Planet Save, have been working on a computer donation program aimed at closing the technological access gap in their community. Ogden approaches the brothers, speaking about Vanuatu’s desperate need for technology and the multitude of threats climate change has brought on Vanuatu’s citizens. Moved by her words, Stanley and Spencer partner with Ogden for an ambitious project: donating a computer lab to a school in Vanuatu, halfway across the world.
The on-site crew flies to Melbourne, then boards a three-hour flight towards Vanuatu to accompany the computers on their journey. For the next five days, the crew works tirelessly from sun up to sun down gathering footage and notes. They often eat on the go to capitalize on every minute of sun they get. They drive from village to village, collecting stories from the Ni-Vanuatu about the effects of environmental degradation. The crew meets exceptional people as if by fate, catching the former prime minister on a walk along the beach and the Paramount Chief just stepping out of his office.
Through conversations with Ogden and plenty of online research, it becomes clear to the Lin brothers and Planet Save that the story of Vanuatu’s struggle against environmental degradation is largely unknown. Stanley decides to set out on a mission to bring awareness to Vanuatu by filming a documentary about its environmental crisis and how the Ni-Vanuatu have risen to fight it.
Planet Save assists in financing the project in three months and brings together a crew of new and old friends for pre-production. Together, they serve as back-end support for Stanley and Spencer as they prepare to shoot a documentary 6,000 miles away from home.
Ogden and Stanley continue to communicate and ready a shipping container to take the computers to Vanuatu. Together, Stanley and the Ogden family painstakingly package and store the computers inside the container for transportation. Finally, the computers are on their way to the island nation.
After obtaining a project partnership with the University of Southern California, Stanley spends several months hunched over computers that USC had retired resourcefully salvaging bits and pieces of hardware slated for e-waste and rebuilding computers. He works over a thousand hours salvaging, repairing, and cleaning computers, expanding the inventory Planet Save would be able to give to Vanuatu.
Back from Vanuatu, Stanley now has to undertake leading a post-production team. Knowing this is not a job for one man alone, he invites lead editor Aiden Bates and writer Maxwell Tong to join the project. Together, they carefully comb through hundreds of hours of footage to construct a cohesive story.
Along the long post-production road, Stanley also brings on Andrew Oropeza, Quenton Xavier Blanche, and Kaitlin Webster-Zuber to compose a poignant original soundtrack.
Ten months later, the team reaches their final cut! At long last, the editing, music, and writing comes together to tell the story of a small chain of islands standing up to the goliath that is climate change.